Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to gateway devices, and more particularly, to gateway devices for use with Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet devices.
Description of the Related Art
Fibre Channel is a high reliability, high speed network technology that is often used in storage networking, particularly in storage area network (SAN) environments. Many data centers use Fibre Channel (FC) for storage networking, and, in conjunction, use Ethernet for TCP/IP networks. As a result, the data center has two separate networks to maintain. FCoE is a network protocol that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames in Ethernet frames in order to allow Fibre Channel to be used over an Ethernet infrastructure. FCoE thus allows storage traffic generated according to the FC protocol to share infrastructure with network traffic generated according to Ethernet protocols such as TCP/IP.